“Okay, let’s go home, then!” Mutsuko declared.
“Sounds good to me, but I sorta forgot what we were out here to accomplish in the first place...” Yuichi said.
They’d come out into town to find the great evil presence; they had run into it right away, and then the resonance had started; the hero Yurika had appeared and told them about the danger Natsuki was in; a tengu had appeared; Yurika had run off; a priest had arrived and beat the tengu; Yuichi had beat the priest; then Yuri had turned into a cat and helped them to trace Natsuki’s scent.
“So our objectives were finding the ‘great evil’ and Takeuchi,” Yuichi summarized. “I guess we managed to do that.”
They had pretty much ignored the war, but it still felt, to him, like they had done enough for one day.
Yuichi cast a glance at Mutsuko. Natsuki seemed to have recovered her presence of mind enough to stand on her own two feet now, so Yuichi approached the fallen woman instead. She was still alive, but one arm was broken, as were her ribs. It didn’t look good.
Yuichi pulled the woman onto his back. He wasn’t sure how trustworthy the evil god was, but all he could do, for now, was believe that he would keep his promise and stay away from her, and them.
Nergal remained right where he was.
Yuichi headed for the exit, and Mutsuko and Natsuki followed. Yuri was at his feet, in cat form.
“Sakaki... am I really free from him?” Natsuki, catching up to him, asked as if she still couldn’t believe it.
“Looks like it, assuming he keeps his promise. You think he will?”
“I think he will.”
“I see,” Yuichi said. “Sounds pretty good to me, then.”
“But I also don’t know what he’ll do about the parts he didn’t promise,” she added.
“Well, that’s true. Something else could still happen, but we’ll deal with that when we come to it.”
“Yes... but thank you for really coming to save me.”
Yuichi blushed a little at her unusually honest reaction.
“Yuichi...” The woman he was carrying spoke up weakly. She seemed to have awakened.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Actually, you probably shouldn’t talk right now. Your chest was badly hurt.”
“I’m okay, this is n...” she trailed off in a cough, spattering blood onto Yuichi’s shoulders. “I’m sorry, Yuichi. I’ll die soon, okay?”
“Hey! It’s okay! Don’t die over that!” he shouted.
“Right. If you don’t mind, then I won’t mind.” Her voice was remarkably clear for someone with a crushed lung, and she also seemed remarkably cheerful.
“Well, I mean, I do mind a little, but it’s okay...” Yuichi said. “Now, Takeuchi. What’s your connection to this person? Though I think I can figure it out...”
They seemed to be fellow serial killers, but he was hesitant to say that out loud.
“Aki Takizawa,” Natsuki said. “A former serial killer. She’s a type of recruitable monster, and since you converted her, she saved me.”
“Right,” he said. “I didn’t quite understand all of that, but if you saved Takeuchi, I’m grateful to you.”
He didn’t know how things had turned out that way, but if Natsuki said the woman had saved her, then as her club mate, Yuichi felt he should thank the woman.
“Yuichi... oh, I can die happy!” Aki said with ecstatic emotion.
“I told you not to die! I’m taking you to a friend’s hospital now!”
Yuichi was planning to take her to Noro General Hospital, where Aiko’s father worked. Since Aiko’s father knew him, he’d probably be flexible, and since the hospital was run by vampires, the fact that the patient was a sort of monster shouldn’t pose a problem.
“You know, the promise was that he’d let us leave this place safely, right? You don’t think he’ll attack us the minute we leave the room, do you?” Mutsuko asked as they arrived at the exit.
“That would be pretty sad. You think he’d do it?” Yuichi glanced back at the center of the room. Nergal was just standing there, and didn’t seem inclined to do anything at all.
“I don’t... think so. I think he has a sort of divine pride,” Natsuki said after a moment’s thought.
If Natsuki said it, it was probably true. She knew the man better than they did, after all.
While still keeping his attention focused on what was behind him, Yuichi left the room.
Nothing happened.
They walked a little further until they reached a staircase, which they ascended, and after climbing for a while, they arrived at a door. It opened into a boiler room with lots of exposed piping.
From this side, the door just looked like a wall, and once they closed it, there was no way to see how to open it again.
“It’s like a one-way door in a dungeon crawler!” Mutsuko cried.
“Are you sure it’s okay for us to be here?” Yuichi asked uneasily.
“What choice do we have?” she shot back. “There was no other way out!”
They seemed to be beneath a hotel.
Avoiding the eyes of the employees, they eventually made it to the lobby, where at last they could take a breather. But Aki was still badly injured, and Yuichi was covered in blood, and they had a cat with them. They wouldn’t be able to stay here for long.
Yuichi made a beeline for the exit, but then, from the exit, a familiar-looking boy appeared.
It was Hiromichi Rokuhara.
He’d seemed to have gone off on his own after parting ways with Nergal. What, then, could he be doing here? Just as Yuichi was wondering about that, his phone rang.
Yuichi set Aki down and answered the phone.
“Hey! Exactly where have you been?” the voice on the other end shouted. “You’ve been impossible to reach for hours! I went to the station and found nobody there! How dare you abandon me?!”
It was Chiharu. It was only natural that she hadn’t been able to reach them; their cell phones wouldn’t have had signal underground.
“Yeah, we were underground for a while,” said Yuichi. “What’s going on?”
“The resonance has started again!”
Resonance wouldn’t end until something was “settled.” It had stopped for a while after the priest had defeated the tengu.
“That explains it,” said Yuichi. “This guy’s a Divine Vessel host, right?”
Nergal had said that Hiromichi had a Divine Vessel.
Hiromichi approached.
“You’re not seriously intending to fight us here, are you?” Yuichi asked. They were in the lobby of a hotel with quite a few people inside. He didn’t know what kind of power Hiromichi had, but if they fought here, it could result in serious human casualties. “Did Nergal guide you here? I guess we did make it out safely, though...”
Maybe he’d thought it wouldn’t be an issue to come after them once they were on the surface.
Hiromichi walked up to Yuichi, and then — remaining outside the boundaries of his personal space — swung a hand at him.
Yuichi didn’t sense any threat in the motion. The trajectory of his hand would come nowhere near hitting him, so he didn’t even have to dodge. He could tell Hiromichi wasn’t hiding anything in his hand, and the movement didn’t seem to be a feint to set up for another attack, either.
Thus, Yuichi ignored it.
Hiromichi’s hand swept through the air in front of him. Suddenly, Yuichi felt dizzy, and was assailed by a powerful feeling of loss.
“Yu!” Mutsuko cried, perhaps surprised by Yuichi’s moment of panic.
His vision went black for a moment, and when it returned, it was blurry and hard to focus. But even as he realized that Hiromichi must have done something, Yuichi’s internal senses told him that nothing had changed.
A moment later his view stabilized, and Yuichi noticed that something was different. Something was strange.
Rather, it wasn’t strange.
What had come before was strange, and now, it was n
ormal. Those annoying labels that showed him people’s roles in life were gone.
Hiromichi smirked.
In that moment, Yuichi realized what had happened.
Soul Reader was gone.
Epilogue: Sort of Like an Intermission
Ryoma sat, surrounded by books and bookshelves. He and his allies were all assembled in Ende’s library.
It seemed the man really had taken it easy on them, because not one of them had turned out to be fatally injured. He’d called up some friends with healing techniques and gotten them all patched up, so they were all in prime condition again.
And now, things were extremely noisy. With a bunch of beautiful women Ryoma knew all together in one room, there was no way things wouldn’t just devolve into chaos.
In the past, he’d been used to having multiple beautiful woman coming on to him and clinging to him, or pushing him away while secretly being happy about his presence. But this time, there were far more than there ever had been before.
A force of fifty of them were gathered together, fighting with each other over Ryoma.
What am I supposed to do? he wondered.
Despite knowing so many beautiful women, Ryoma wasn’t especially good at dealing with them. All he could do was watch the chaos.
Ende arrived, the one who had effectively caused the situation, and the gazes of all present focused on her.
“I hear three is a crowd when it comes to girls, but this is just ridiculous,” Ende commented. “I can’t even enjoy my reading with all this noise.”
“Reading, huh?” he muttered. “So that’s where you were...”
“Well, connecting all these worldviews takes a lot of power, so let’s send them away for a while.”
At Ende’s words, an abrupt silence fell on the library. Ryoma and Ende were the only ones left in the now-unnervingly-quiet space.
“Huh? What happened?” he asked.
“I just returned them to their worlds. Now, let’s have a little talk.”
“Fine,” he said. “What’s the subject?”
“The Divine Vessels War, of course. And how we’re going to win.”
“It should be easy with your power, right?” he asked. She could call all the powerful allies they needed. It was hard to imagine how anyone could stand a chance. He had lost to the Evil God itself, but the god wasn’t a participant, so he probably wouldn’t have to deal with him again.
“No, I think we’re still in a bad position,” said Ende. “Mainly because of you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You could have done more in the fight with the Evil God, couldn’t you? He was trying not to kill your allies. You figured that out halfway, right? So if you’d been willing to sacrifice one or two of them, attacking him along with them, the Evil God might have hesitated. Because he didn’t want to kill them, you know? He might have even done something careless to protect them.”
“There’s no way I could do that!” shouted Ryoma.
“You can,” Ende countered. “You can, and you must. The people you think of as your allies actually have nothing to do with your world. They’re basically characters in a book. You need to realize that it doesn’t matter if they get erased.”
“But...”
“Don’t worry,” Ende told him. “Characters in books never really go away. They’ll always still be there if you turn back to an earlier page. I really need you to start coming to grips with that. If you can’t, then nothing I do will help you.”
“I’m telling you, I can’t do that! I adventured with those people! I can’t sacrifice them!” he shouted.
“Hmm, I thought you’d say that, so I prepared a location for training.” With that, Ende suddenly disappeared.
“Huh?” Ryoma said.
“That’s a training room.” He could hear only Ende’s voice. “You can use it however you like. I’ve transferred a bit of my power to you, so you can summon your allies by reading the books around you.”
“Wait a minute! What am I supposed to do with all this?” he shouted.
“Soon enough, enemies will start appearing from the worlds I’ve prepared. If you defeat them, you can leave, but if you die, you have to start it all over from the beginning. Don’t worry; you’ll get out eventually. Each time you die, you’ll learn a little more. Take as many thousands of times as you need.”
“Hey! Is that it?!” Ryoma shouted. But he was now alone in the world of books and bookshelves.
✽✽✽✽✽
“Hmm. I hope he can handle this...” Ende murmured.
She expected Ryoma to come out after about an hour of real time. She didn’t know how many thousands of hours it would feel like to him, but she felt sure that he would be much stronger by then, at least.
“But the real question is whether it’ll be enough to take out Yuichi Sakaki...”
Yuichi Sakaki really was trouble.
He had easily landed a hit on the same Evil God that had given Ryoma such trouble. She wondered, for a moment, what would have happened if they’d properly fought, and decided that Yuichi would have probably won. Mutsuko had been there, after all, and while Mutsuko was watching, there was no way that Yuichi could lose.
“That’s the power of ‘An Unforgiving World That Rewards Only Effort,’ I guess,” Ende murmured. That was her name for Mutsuko’s worldview. Within that worldview, those who put in effort were rewarded, while those who relied on their god-given talent and power were helpless.
Most monsters were effortlessly strong. They had been born or created that way, so they never needed training.
Monsters were useless. They couldn’t beat Yuichi Sakaki.
That was why she had decided that she needed Ryoma to put in some effort. Die, learn, try again. She was hoping he’d grow desperate soon enough.
“Well, setting that aside, I need a more fundamental countermeasure.”
She didn’t know if Ryoma’s effort could put him on par with Yuichi. She just had to try it and see what happened. But while she was doing that, she needed another, more foolproof plan.
What could it be? Ende had an idea.
To separate Yuichi and Mutsuko.
To sever the tie between them.
Once that happened, Mutsuko’s influence over Yuichi would be lost.
And Ende had the power to make that possible.
A change from one worldview to another.
She just had to use that on Yuichi, to tear Yuichi out of Mutsuko’s world.
“The question is, how to fulfill the requirements to activate it...”
And so Ende began applying all her wits to do just that.
Afterword
Sorry for the wait, but here’s volume 6.
I really am sorry to the people who were waiting. (You exist, right? I hope you exist!)
I made it to volume 5, but I wasn’t expecting things to last this long. I owe it to the readers for getting me this far. Thank you so much, truly.
But once you get to volume 6, what do you write in the afterword? I’m starting to run out of things to write about.
Let’s talk about my hobbies, I guess.
I’m not the kind of person to have specific set hobbies, but when I get free time, I do like playing video games.
Video games can be a huge time sink. Of course, it depends on the type of game, but recently, RPGs have been getting longer.
It’s not bad if you just want to finish the story, but to unlock all of the content requires a huge time commitment. In the old days, I never got tired of killing the same enemies over and over and scrutinizing their drop items, but lately, I realized, I just can’t enjoy that the way I used to. I guess it might be different if I lost my job and had nothing but free time, but that would be a sad situation in its own way.
Oh by the way, the time I realized that, I was playing Xenoblade Chronicles X. I finished the main story, but I couldn’t make any progress through the side stories at all. It just felt like it would take so
much time...
The next thing I want to play is Fire Emblem Fates, but to clear all three storylines seems like it would be such a time commitment, too...
That reminds me, a certain development near the end of volume 4 came from some research I did. It’s a spoiler, so I won’t go into detail, but I heard what it was like from someone who had experienced it, and I tried writing it that way.
Incidentally he ended up that way because he took a menghu yi pashan at full strength. It might be a little unbelievable, but it’s romantic, at least.
Incidentally, I’m writing in more different places now, but sometimes I feel a little hesitant to spend a lot of time in a cafe or a restaurant. I get worried that I’m monopolizing a table, and things like that. I could go to an internet cafe and pay some money to reserve a room and do whatever I want there, but there are too many distractions there. So I did a little searching around and found there’s something called a “coworking space.”
It’s just a thousand yen to rent, whether you’re there for just an hour or a whole day. You can plug in and use wireless internet, which seems very convenient. But it also seems like the kind of place for people who are very concerned about collaboration and communication and synergy, so I decided not to use it. I just want to do my work in silence...
Now for the acknowledgments.
I’m very sorry to my editor for making a lot of trouble once again. (It’s convenient that I can use acknowledgments both for thanks and apologies.)
And to An2A, who did the illustrations, thanks for doing great illustrations once again. Tomomi’s cheongsam is the best, and I’m glad Nihao the China gets to appear on the cover!
Well, see you next volume!
Tsuyoshi Fujitaka
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My Big Sister Lives in a Fantasy World: Humanity's Extinction Actually Happens This Time With the Evil God's Revival?!
Humanity's Extinction Actually Happens This Time With the Evil God's Revival?! Page 16